Casteller DOC

The everyday red of the Trentino, made across most of the province’s vineyard land and named after a single hill. Casteller is the wine Trentino families drank at home, and it is disappearing quietly while the province plants Pinot Grigio.

The Name The registered file is unusually specific. The denomination takes its name from the locality of Casteller, an admirable vine-clad hill south of Trento, where tradition holds this type of wine was born; its appreciation, the file says, caused production to spread across the territory now delimited. And it dates the first written record: the name appears for the first time in the Chronicles of the Council of Trent written by Michelangelo Mariani in 1673.

The Terroir The area is predominantly mountainous or hilly, and the file gives the vineyard range precisely: from 70 to 600 metres above sea level. It stretches from Ala and Avio in the south up through the Vallagarina to Trento and the Valle dei Laghi, taking in Arco and Dro near Lake Garda — glacial valley floors, alluvial fans and terraced slopes, on limestone and porphyry debris.

Grape Varieties Schiava in its Grossa and Gentile forms is the base, with Merlot, Lagrein, Teroldego and Enantio — listed in the file under its old name, Lambrusco a Foglia Frastagliata — permitted alongside. The result is light in colour and body, dry and easy, at modest alcohol.

The Critical Take Casteller is honest, cheap and completely unfashionable, and it is being abandoned for the reason everything gets abandoned: Schiava yields a pale red nobody wants when the same hectare can grow Pinot Grigio that sells itself. That is a real loss. Light, chillable, low-alcohol reds are exactly what a great many drinkers now say they want, and Trentino has been making one for three and a half centuries. The good bottles taste of red cherry and almond skin and are best served at cellar temperature.

Schiava, and What Happened to It Schiava was once the most planted red variety in the whole Trentino-Alto Adige, filling the valley floors and supplying an enormous trade north into Austria and Germany. Plantings have fallen by something on the order of ninety per cent since the 1970s. Casteller and Alto Adige’s Santa Maddalena and Lago di Caldaro are what remain of it, and they are among the last places to meet a grape that once defined the region.

At the Table Trentino cooking: canederli, speck, strangolapreti, polenta with mushrooms, and Trentingrana. Serve cool, 13–15°C.

Benchmark Producers The province’s large cooperatives — Cavit, La Vis and Cantina Rotaliana — account for nearly all of it.